Porous biodegradable microtubes-based scaffolds for tissue engineering, part I: production and preliminary in vitro...

we aimed at investigating spinning as a potential technology to produce porous microtubes for constructing scaffolds. Spinning is indeed a well known technique for producing polymeric fibres, also used in the biomedical field, but its applications for tissue engineering purposes has never been deeply investigated.

the behaviour of a multi-phase poly-lactide-caprolactone copolymer based solution was here studied for the production under spinning condition of porous microtubes for patterning planar and three dimensional bioactive systems to be used for tissue regeneration. Obtained non-woven fabrics were tested investigating cells response with fibroblast, osteoblasts and chondrocytes.

once achieved optimal process parameters, microtubes were produced with a controlled and well diffused porosity which were then used to build two and three dimensional scaffolds. Cytocompatibility tests performed on these scaffolds showed good results on all tested cell models, both qualitatively (SEM imaging) and quantitatively. Particularly, cell proliferation assays by Alamar Blue staining indicated increasing trends with time and comparable values with controls.

results hereby described represent a proof of concept of the process developed and its applicability for obtaining microtubes with controlled porosity. Moreover, two and three dimensional scaffolds built from such fibres showed to be very promising substrates for cell adhesion and growth. Finally, the process developed can be taken into GMP qualification and thus scaffolds can be upgraded to medical devices and used for regenerative medicine into human applications.